According to a contemporary newspaper account,[2] the body of the younger Phoebe Veitch was found on the Wanganui River beach on the morning of 27 February by Arthur Fitchett, a telegraph linesperson.
Giving medical testimony, Dr Earle noted that the drowned child was the product of a cross-cultural relationship between persons of Chinese and European descent.
Mrs. Veitch was pregnant with another child at the time, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court then sentenced her to death, although it remained to be disclosed whether the pregnancy could be substantiated by local midwives.
On 25 May it was reported that Ministers of the Crown had intervened in the case and commuted Mrs. Veitch's sentence to life imprisonment.
[4] [5] She was imprisoned in Wellington at the Terrace Gaol and gave birth to a fourth child, Robert, before dying there on 2 September 1891 [6] Comparing the Veitch case with those of Caroline Whitting, Sarah-Jane and Anna Flannagan and Minnie Dean, Bronwyn Dalley has suggested that the courts were willing to recognise that arduous social and family circumstances could lead to maternal 'madness' and may have prompted commuted sentences, while Dean's death sentence was related to an element of deliberation absent in the Veitch, Whitting and other cases of parental child murder.
[7] Since the emergence of social historian interest in infanticide as a practice within New Zealand society, Phoebe Veitch's case has received increased recognition, given that it was one of the most prominent case law predecessors to that of Minnie Dean, who was executed for baby farming.